Smell 'sensations' are among the most mysterious of conscious experiences, and have been cited in defense of the thesis that the character of perceptual experience is independent of the physical events that seem to give rise to it. Here we review the scientific literature on olfaction, and we argue that olfaction has a distinctive profile in relation to the other modalities, on four counts: in the physical nature of the stimulus, in the sensorimotor interactions that characterize its use, in the (...) structure of its intramodal distinctions and in the functional role that it plays in people's behaviour. We present two thought experiments in which we detail what would be involved in transforming sounds into smells, and also smells into colours. Through these thought-experiments, we argue that the experiential character of smell derives precisely from the structural features of olfaction, and that an embodied account of olfactory phenomenology is called for. (shrink)

Buddhism and American Thinkers. Ed. by Kenneth K. Inada and Nolan P. Jacobson. State University of New York, Albany 1984. xix, 180pp.

In the introductory chapter to this collection, the editors point out that, until recently, most Anglophone Spinoza scholarship has been focused on the metaphysics and epistemology of the Ethics. But according to Kisner and Youpa, Spinoza thought that metaphysics and epistemology were significant chiefly because they are required for understanding the more important part of his project—the ethical doctrine developed in the last three parts of the work. Ethica was so-titled because it is a book about ethics.In recent years, the (...) scholarly community has begun to shift its attention to bring itself more in line with Spinoza's intentions—to focus more directly on his ethical views. The volume under review presents... (shrink)

It has been alleged that Carolus Linnaeus practised Eurocentrism, sexism and racism in naming plant genera after famous botanists, and excluding ‘barbarous names’. He has therefore been said to practise ‘linguistic imperialism’. This paper examines whether Linnaeus applied ‘linguistic imperialism’ to the naming of Chinese plants. On the basis of examples such as Thea (¼Camellia), Urena, Basella, Annona, Sapindus (¼Koelreuteria), and Panax, I conclude that Linnaeus used generic names of diverse origins. However, he misidentified Chinese plants’ habitats, and acted on (...) these misapprehensions. (shrink)

The recently published Cambridge Companion to Spinoza contains a fine essay by Pierre- Francois Moreau on Spinoza’s reception and on his influence during the more than three hundred years that have passed since his death. In Moreau’s twenty-five page article we find a brief paragraph on the novelist George Eliot and half a sentence on Ed Curley. There is not another mention, at all, of any other philosopher from an English-speaking land since the seventeenth century – nothing on how Spinoza’s (...) ideas were received in England, North America or Australia. Not a word on any influence that Spinoza might have had on later thinkers in those countries. (shrink)

IN an article on Rousseau’s annotations of a popular botany text, Henry Cheyron describes the Genevan philosopher as ‘ce botaniste me´juge´’. 3 The misapprehension of Rousseau’s botanical practice identified by Cheyron has its roots, I believe, in Rousseau’s own depiction of his botanising in the Reˆveries; in the ‘Septie`me promenade’ Rousseau selfconsciously portrays this study as socially isolated, lazy and lacking in direction: ‘La botanique est l’e´tude d’un oisif et paresseux solitaire... Il se prome`ne, il erre librement d’un objet a` (...) l’autre, il fait la revue de chaque fleur avec inte´reˆt et curiosite´.’4 Neither does Rousseau disguise botany’s role for him as a ‘the´rapeutique improvise´e’; the therapeutic purpose has tended to obscure the rigour, application, time and knowledge that Rousseau put into his botanical studies so that no less a scholar than Jean Starobinski asserts: ‘Jean-Jacques herborise en collectionneur, et non pas en naturaliste. C’est pour lui une occupation, un amusement, plutoˆt qu’une ve´ritable action.’5 Finally, Rousseau fuels this misunderstanding.. (shrink)

Putnam’s most famous contribution to mathematical logic was his role in investigating Hilbert’s Tenth Problem; Putnam is the ‘P’ in the MRDP Theorem. This volume, though, focusses mostly on Putnam’s work on the philosophy of logic and mathematics. It is a somewhat bumpy ride. Of the twelve papers, two scarcely mention Putnam. Three others focus primarily on Putnam’s ‘Mathematics without foundations’ (1967), but with no interplay between them. The remaining seven papers apparently tackle unrelated themes. Some of this disjointedness would (...) doubtless have been addressed, if Putnam had been able to compose his replies to these papers; sadly, he died before this was possible. In this review, I do my best to tease out some connections between the paper; and there are some really interesting connections to be made. (shrink)

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one formal logic that correctly (or best, or legitimately) codifies the logical consequence relation in natural language. This essay provides a taxonomy of different variations on the logical pluralist theme based on a five-part structure, and then identifies an unoccupied position in this taxonomy: perspectival logical pluralism. Perspectival pluralism provides an attractive position from which to formulate a philosophy of logic from a feminist perspective (and from other, identity-based perspectives, such (...) as critical race theory). An example of how such an account might be developed is sketched. The essay concludes by defusing an obvious objection to the perspectival approach: the claim that the correct logic (or logics), in virtue of the formal nature of logic, should be independent of considerations regarding the identity of the reasoner. (shrink)

This paper concerns top-down approaches in machine ethics. It is divided into three main parts. First, I briefly describe top-down design approaches, and in doing so I make clear what those approaches are committed to and what they involve when it comes to training an AI to behave ethically. In the second part, I formulate two underappreciated motivations for endorsing them, one relating to predictability of machine behavior and the other relating to scrutability of machine decision-making. Finally, I present three (...) major worries about such approaches, and I attempt to show that advocates of top-down approaches have some plausible avenues of response. I focus most of my attention on what I call the ‘technical manual objection’ to top-down approaches, inspired by the work of Annas (2004). In short, the idea is that top-down approaches treat ethical decision-making as being merely a matter of following some ethical instructions in the same way that one might follow some set of instructions contained in a technical manual (e.g., computer manual), and this invites sensible skepticism about the ethical wisdom of machines that have been trained on those approaches. I respond by claiming that the objection is successful only if it is understood as targeting machines that have certain kinds of goals, and it should not compel us to totally abandon top-down approaches. Such approaches could still be reasonably employed to design ethical AI that operate in contexts that include fairly noncontroversial answers to ethical questions. In fact, we should prefer top-down approaches when it comes to those types of context, or so I argue, due to the advantages I claim for them. (shrink)

This study renders the complex corpus of the Guodian texts into a more easily manageable form, incorporating the past several years of scholarly activity on these texts and providing them with a comprehensive introduction along with a complete and well-annotated translation into English.

After the Second World War, Adorno was politically engaged as a critical public intellectual in the new Federal Republic of Germany. Nonetheless, in the 1960s, a time of active protest against established norms and the underlying socio‐economic and political conditions, he was widely perceived by the protesting activists as adopting an attitude of resignation in blatant contradiction to the aims of his critical social theory. The chapter considers the validity of this accusation. Section 37.1 sets out Adorno's position with regard (...) to the relationship between theory and praxis from the 1950s onwards. Section 37.2 considers the adequacy of his position from the point of view of Critical Social Theory's fundamental concern with radical societal transformation. Contending that Adorno does in effect adopt a stance of resignation vis‐à‐vis radical societal transformation, it draws attention to some questionable elements in his theory that push him toward adopting this stance. It concludes that his theory would benefit from dispensing with them. (shrink)

The No-No Paradox consists of a pair of statements, each of which ?says? the other is false. Roy Sorensen claims that the No-No Paradox provides an example of a true statement that has no truthmaker: Given the relevant instances of the T-schema, one of the two statements comprising the ?paradox? must be true (and the other false), but symmetry constraints prevent us from determining which, and thus prevent there being a truthmaker grounding the relevant assignment of truth values. Sorensen's view (...) is mistaken: situated within an appropriate background theory of truth, the statements comprising the No-No Paradox are genuinely paradoxical in the same sense as is the Liar (and thus, on Sorensen's view, must fail to have truth values). This result has consequences beyond Sorensen's semantic framework. In particular, the No-No Paradox, properly understood, is not only a new paradox, but also provides us with a new type of paradox, one which depends upon a general background theory of the truth predicate in a way that the Liar Paradox and similar constructions do not. (shrink)

Inleiding wetenschapsfilosofie voor 3e jaarsstudenten wis- en natuurkunde aan de TH Delft en Universiteit van Amsterdam.

This appendix is intended to assist the reader in becoming comfortable with the notations, rules, and definitions of Frege's Grundgesetze.

This “fun, brain-twisting book... will make you think” as it explores more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, philosophy, physics, and the social sciences (Sean Carroll, New York Times–bestselling author of Something Deeply Hidden) Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician’s purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn’t require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create (...) the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind, Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts—and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world—and much more. (shrink)

Paradoxes are arguments that lead from apparently true premises, via apparently uncontroversial reasoning, to a false or even contradictory conclusion. Paradoxes threaten our basic understanding of central concepts such as space, time, motion, infinity, truth, knowledge, and belief. In this volume Roy T Cook provides a sophisticated, yet accessible and entertaining, introduction to the study of paradoxes, one that includes a detailed examination of a wide variety of paradoxes. The book is organized around four important types of paradox: the semantic (...) paradoxes involving truth, the set-theoretic paradoxes involving arbitrary collections of objects, the Soritical paradoxes involving vague concepts, and the epistemic paradoxes involving knowledge and belief. In each of these cases, Cook frames the discussion in terms of four different approaches one might take towards solving such paradoxes. Each chapter concludes with a number of exercises that illustrate the philosophical arguments and logical concepts involved in the paradoxes. _Paradoxes_ is the ideal introduction to the topic and will be a valuable resource for scholars and students in a wide variety of disciplines who wish to understand the important role that paradoxes have played, and continue to play, in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

There is broad agreement that child labor is wrong and should be eliminated. This chapter examines the three main moral objections to child labor and considers their limitations: harm-based objections, objections from failing to benefit children, and objections from exploitation. Harm-based objections struggle with baselines for comparison and difficulties with Non-Identity problems. Even if child labor is not harmful, it may be wrong because it prevents children from enjoying other benefits, such as schooling. However, is schooling necessarily more beneficial for (...) children than work? Some kinds of child labor may not be harmful, and may benefit children, but they may still be wrong because they are exploitative. I consider some ways to address exploitative child labor, inspired by campaigns led by child workers. The chapter ends with a surprising conclusion that challenges the broad consensus with which we began: we may have duties to promote child labor. (shrink)

Western metaphysics has been distorted by Aristotle's misconception of essence and (il)logic of male homophobia. Via its inscription of female bodies, this muddled metaphysics is causing a fragmentation of self that is currently leading to eating disorders. A spirogenetic model of essence and subjectivity may solve our metaphysical and thus mental ills.

Being on the side of the angels is tougher in some historical moments than others. Military ethicists are living through one such era now and taking our share of elbows every day. Consider how the...